CDP: a Content Discovery Protocol for Mobile P2P Systems

Abstract: The emergence of affordable wireless and mobile devices was a key step towards deploying mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. The latter allow users to share and search diverse multimedia resources over Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). Due to the nature of MANETs, P2P mobile systems brought up many new thriving challenges, in particular with regard to the content discovery issue. Thus, the design of an efficient content discovery protocol has been of paramount importance. The thriving challenge is to (i) locate relevant peers sharing pertinent resources for users queries and then (ii) to ensure that those peers would be reached by considering different MANET constraints (e.g., peer mobility, battery energy, peer load, to cite a few). Even though the literature witnesses a wealthy number of content discovery protocols, only few of them have considered the above-mentioned requirements. To overcome this shortage, we introduce in this paper an efficient Content Discovery Protocol (CDP) for P2P mobile systems. The idea underlying our proposal is to route users queries to relevant peers that are (1) more suitable to answer the user query according to its content, (2) more stable to relay query hits, (3) less loaded to avoid the network congestion issue and (4) having more battery lifetime to avoid the network partitioning issue. The performed experiments show that CDP outperforms its competitor in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.